I am deeply attracted to the process of hacking – perhaps because I taught at MIT for a long time, or maybe because I tend to approach life with a similar problem-solving mindset.

Think about what hackers do. They start by looking at the flow of information in a system – let’s say a series of servers – and then try to identify weak points along the path. Once they identify the weak points, they try out all kinds of ways to attack them, forcing the system as a whole to behave in certain ways (often toward not-so-desirable outcomes, at least from the perspective of the people who try to run the system).

I think social scientists often work in an analogous way, though (of course) with nobler intentions. Let’s say that we social scientists want to look at a certain human behavior, such as overeating at the cafeteria: we would start by examining the different steps that people take as they go through the cafeteria – looking at where the customers stand, what they see, who they see, what tempts them, how they decide what to take, where and how they pay, and so on. Next, we would try to identify possible points in the process that seem to encourage or enable overeating, and then try to come up with different ways to influence peoples’ decisions at these weak points.

For example, we might notice that people pass by the burger-and-fries station on the way to the salad bar. If the cafeteria is set up this way, it’s very hard for hungry people to resist temptation. So with this in mind, we might suggest to push the burger stand off into to the far corner and place the salad bar front and center. Alternatively, we might realize that people fill up their plates to their capacity, so we might recommend decreasing the plate size (a strategy that Brian Wansink shows to be effective in achieving weight loss).

By conducting this kind of “hacking analysis” of the way people behave in a cafeteria “system,” we can discover the most promising ways to intervene in the process and improve behavior.

Another thing I like about the hacking analogy is that hackers are not necessarily looking for one absolute solution. Rather, they are looking for a simple approach, using available tools, in order to get the “job” done right now. This is not to say that we should come up with interventions in a slap-dash fashion, but the standard academic approach to exploring all the possible nuances of a topic for 30 years and understanding it in perfect detail before suggesting any intervention … well, I simply don’t have that kind of patience. I’m much more excited by cases of human behavior where we can learn something essential in a relatively short timeframe, test ways to change behavior for the better, improve the process, and continue learning and improving.

Enjoyable hacking to us all,

Dan

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Your understanding of why people get fat that comes through in this blog post and others seems to be the conventional wisdom notion of “eat-less, exercise-more.” These understanding of weight loss is the weakness that you should be attacking as a hacker. This is where people fail.

Behavioral economics understands evolutionary reasons for human shortcomings in logic and reasoning. The same can be applied to diet, where our modern diet is terribly mismatched with our mostly-paleolithic genes.

I just find it frustrating that someone who shows so much insight into how people are “predictably irrational” has such a “classical economics” view of over-eating and weight gain.

For having worked at MIT, I’m surprised you used such a narrow example of hacking to compare your work to. The media-centric vision of hackers as system-busting bad boys has been one that distracts from the original intent of the idea (begun at MIT), that hacking is about gaming any number of systems, be they related to computers, engineering, social systems, etc.

A “hack” is a clever, often funny, sometimes self-mocking work-around. Often it exposes weaknesses in systems, and that’s how it relates to computer hacking. But the term has been used to relate to hacking the genome, Wall Street, language, workplace productivity, etc.

I think it’s great that you’d want to hack behavioral studies… makes perfect sense. You’re in a long line of hackers, though, who aren’t out to steal secret files from the Pentagon or shut down the phone networks.

A relevant quote from my computer security lecture a while back is “Amateurs hack computers, professionals hack people”. People are often the easier thing to target in a security system than going through the more obvious route of hacking the computer eg, why try and figure out encryption and all that when you could just trick a person into giving you the password. Hence all good security practices should incorporate a people element.

Computer security and security in general has many lessons it can take from behavioural economics…

This tract reminds me of the location of primary staples (milk, eggs & bread) in a supermarket. They are always located in the area the furthest away from the main entrance door. This may prompt one to purchase more things when they only wanted to get a basic necessity.

I’m a computer scientist who uses techniques from social science to study computer security problems. (My thesis is on making access control better for real-world organizations, like hospitals.)

Dan, you beautifully summarize what attracts me to both fields. I am now sending a link to this post to my relatives, and telling them I do what you describe—only my conclusions land in technology instead of sociology. With your help, I may be able to help them understand that I do more than just break computer systems!

the only words that come to mind on hacking was form an ex ibm programer i use to know if there is a system it can be broke doesnt matter what system it is it can be broke i have lived by that for a long time

This caught my eye, as it relates to food :-) I implement “hacking” techniques all day long, like a cross between Julia Child and Angus MacGyver. Cooking in others’ homes often means using their substandard tools in ill-equipped kitchens, sometimes with ingredients that aren’t quite what I’d hoped for (i.e. produce in winter in TN)

If “hacking” means “making something have a different result than it would ordinarily by tinkering with the process”, that’s the aspect of your work that’s always attracted me. I never thought of it as hacking, though.

Even watching someone’s eye movements to detect lies* would be hacking, since you’ve tweaked the person’s intended communication using your knowledge of their subliminal body language.

As a layman’s response to information overload, your social hacking metaphor inspires me to coin another: “wisdom hacking.” I.e., the fleeting insight in laymen as a result of a judicious sampling of professional science-folk’s tweets and blogs.

(And I prefer the wisdom-hacking metaphor over ‘google is making us stupid’ in the ‘how it all affects us’ debate.)

So to you and all the science-folks who work to make it all so easy to understand for the rest of us, thank you.

There is a problem with the last part of your analogy – the law of unintended consequences.

Sure, hackers (by the definition you’re using) just want a tool to do the job now – but then hackers (by that definition) don’t generally have to care if their intrusion also breaks some of the affected systems.

In cases where an attack is more sophisticated – perhaps it needs to remain undetected so can’t afford to cripple the target system too soon – then the hacker does have to put more time and effort into preparing an appropriate solution. If someone today quickly throws together a relatively sophisticated attack, it’s because they’re building on decades of work that came before.

I would hope that behavioral scientists are more concerned about understanding the side-effects of their interventions than the garden-variety hacker. When the risks are low (it’s one thing to rearrange a cafeteria), it may not matter; but I would expect interventions into larger systems – especially those that people are required to use on a large scale – to come with more scrutiny and, on the part of the scientists, more patience.

The Old Country Buffet is a perfect example of something. I’m not sure what. There the defining variable becomes the amount of walking to get a new plate. So folks load up a ‘dog’s breakfast’ of stuff (meat, potatoes, salad, gravy, etc.) piled so high it’s flowing off the plate. Saw one woman eating several plate loads chased with Slimfasts because she was on a diet.

However, if you put salads and veggies on a cafeteria line FIRST, folks will take more of those.

And, my favorite, the food samples at COSTCO. Folks stand in line for 3 M&Ms. WTF?

Taubes argues that the poor are eating a subsistence diet but are fat because carbs are cheap. Which is driven (in my view) by crop-specific multi-billion dollar farm subsidies. Both sugar and HFCS are heavily subsidized.

Or look how we destroyed Haitian farmers with free white rice (which has almost no nutrients).

Taubes also argues that the geometric progression cascade of obesity is fat folks have fat babies that grow up to have fat babies so in x generations everybody is bred to be fat.

That ‘standard approach’ you mention is as good an excuse as any to avoid change and adaptation. It’s also an excellent excuse for avoiding responsibility. (I don’t want to evoke a reaction based in fixation, but I’m going to take that chance.)

Research is dragged out for purposes of funding. Toxins are not banned for purposes of greed. The idea that constant studies must be made on a thing when any perceptive person can already see the connections is encouraged. (Hmmm… there’s my fixation for you.)

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Interesting article… your hacking analogy also rings true also in the way real-life cyber criminals go after the “weakest members” of our internet connected society, e.g. those running Windows XP, without anti-virus software are very likely to be infected by botnet malware for example, more than any other users. Also, hackers are most likely not going to run some advanced password cracking tool if your password is already unencrypted, sailing over the public WiFi hotspot which you just connected to at StarBucks. Some further reading here … http://www.internetsecuritydb.com/2011/08/classifying-hacking-in-4d-impact.html …
it introduces a new approach to classifying hacking events in terms of four attributes; evilness, impact, illegality and complexity.
Cheers, Royston.

Having read this I thought it was extremely informative. I appreciate you taking the time and energy to put
this short article together. I once again find myself personally spending a lot of time both reading and commenting.
But so what, it was still worth it!

Hi, I’m Dan Ariely. I do research in behavioral economics and try to describe it in plain language. These findings have enriched my life, and my hope is that they will do the same for you.